The decadent republic of letters : taste, politics, and cosmopolitan community from Baudelaire to Beardsley /

Whenever a prestigious counterculture experiences a renaissance, the Decadence--which can be dated from Charles Baudelaire's legal problems with Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) to Aubrey Beardsley's death (1898)--becomes timely. Potolsky (Univ. of Utah) proposes that whatever inconsistencies of political position its exemplars displayed, they all imagined an aesthetic community in which they could critique the prevailing liberalism and nationalism. Accordingly, Potolsky gives nuanced readings of not only Baudelaire and Beardsley, but also Gautier, Swinburne, Pater, Huysmans, Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Rachilde. The author calls attention to the recovery of Michael Field (the pseudonym used by Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper). He concludes with a brilliant translation and detailed analysis of Mallarme's "Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire" (1893), in which he relies on Mallarme's penchant for etymologies. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. M. Gaddis Rose SUNY at Binghamton